On Thu, 6 Mar 2008 10:47 +0000 (GMT Standard Time), Paul Dormer
<prd@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
> wrote:
> In article <fqnhb2$7n0$1@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
>, kfl@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
(Keith F.
> Lynch) wrote:
>
>> Okay, I guess I should have said allied lives. Americans tend to
>> think of the European Theater as an allied effort, but the Pacific
>> Theater as just US vs. Japan.
>
> The Duke of Edinburgh (husband to the Queen) served in the Pacific War.
> I saw him being interviewed on TV about his experiences many years ago.
>
> He mentioned that he was on the bridge of his ****p with an American
> officer standing next to him. There was a British aircraft carrier
> alongside his ****p. Suddenly, a kamikaze plane crashed into the deck
> of the aircraft carrier. The American officer started to panic,
> expecting a big explosion.
>
> Turned out that US aircraft carriers had wooden flight decks. He was
> expecting the plane to go right through and blow up the magazine.
>
> British aircraft carriers had armoured flight decks. The duke said
> that what happened next was, after the smoke had cleared, a number of
> ratings appeared with brooms and swept the wreckage over the side.
There were a couple of drawbacks to the British approach to carrier
design. One was that when you did take a big enough hit to damage the
armored deck, it was much more difficult to fix than the wooden
non-structural flight deck on a USN ****p. More critically, though, a
British carrier of a given displacement couldn't carry nearly as many
planes as an equivalent US ****p.
The Illustrious class, which was the main fleet carrier class in the RN,
carried something like 40 planes on 30,000 tons of displacement.[1] The
USN Es*** class, which was marginally bigger at 35,000 tons, could
operate close to 100 aircraft.[2]
-dms
[1] http://www.hazegray.org/navhist/carriers/uk_fleet.htm
[2] http://www.hazegray.org/navhist/carriers/us_fleet.htm
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